pleeker - 5:38 pm on May 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

I recently came across a business owner who has three separate web sites related to the products and services he sells. The structure and content is similar on each site, though not duplicated to the point that any site would be penalized. They all deal with similar keywords and each site often shows up in the same SERPs at Google, Yahoo, etc.

One of the sites, he says, has much higher rankings than the other two. And the main difference, from his point of view, is that this one site offers an RSS/XML news feed. He's convinced that offering this feed is giving this site more credit and helping it rank higher than the sites without the feed.

I suppose it could be nothing more than this site having more incoming links because of the feed. Or perhaps there's an "authority" trigger because this site offers news about the products/services.

Has anyone seen any evidence of an RSS feed directly helping a site's rankings? Any other theories for or against what this business owner believes to be true?